Crime prevention, victim support, and conducting effective investigations all require reliable data. It’s crucial to know what strategies are working, and what they cost, to deliver a cost-effective service. It’s historically been difficult for policing leaders, policymakers, and others to access information that compares both performance and cost.
Whilst traditional indicators, such as arrests, charges, and convictions are widely reported, it’s more difficult to find information on those showing positive outcomes such as civil orders. Cost information is also available, but the two sources have never been integrated in this way, so it hasn’t been easy to identify the most productive models in policing. This has created an opportunity for improvement within a major policing organisation.
Challenge
As part of the national, independent Policing Productivity Review, PwC - through the NEPRO3 Framework, delivered by Bloom on behalf of NEPO, was asked to help the policing organisation’s review team. Together, the challenge was to build a ‘model process’ tool to enable policing leaders to better understand their force’s productivity relative to other forces.
To prove the concept, PwC developed a tool that combines performance and cost data in a set of interactive dashboards. The key inputs are a blended basket of performance measures which include both of those and other metrics which forces have agreed. Those are then set alongside the cost of policing a single instance of the crime to create relative rankings for both cost and performance, which can then be compared with other forces.
As well as showing relative productivity, the tool then surfaces specific recommendations on how forces could improve and provides visibility of the detailed process that other forces are following so they can learn from each other. The tool aims to help forces to identify the best ‘model’ processes in policing to help drive productivity improvements.
Solution
Working with six pilot forces, NPCC National leads and SMEs, PwC drilled into four policing areas - burglary, domestic abuse, public contact, and anti-social behaviour. They then developed a proof of concept (PoC) to benchmark police productivity across those four areas across the six pilot forces, to test whether the approach works and whether it could be scaled nationally and across more areas, for example case file quality, robbery etc.
The PwC team used an agile approach of designing, testing, building and iteration over a nine month period which included:
Design
PwC defined functional and user requirements by working with the policing community to determine what should be measured to understand performance in various areas. The team then facilitated reaching consensus on the types of tactics, tools, and techniques which forces can deploy against each type of problem.
Test
The team created wireframes and refined them to illustrate the look and feel of the tool for various stakeholders to enable rapid prototyping. Once the wireframes and the data requirements were agreed, they tested the data collection mechanism so the model could be populated with real data. The joint consultant / client team worked intensively with forces to collect the data needed, engaging regularly with a network of champions across forces. While the data collection process was not without its challenges (around the level of data available in forces, effort required to collect it, and its comparability), ultimately PwC was able to collect sufficient data to prove the concept.
Build & Iterate
Once the tool was built and populated with data, it was then shared with the pilot forces to gather feedback so the tool could be improved and iterated in PowerBI over a 16-week period.
The tool provided insight into productivity by setting out performance outcome data alongside Home Office cost information. For the first time, the tool allowed forces to see their productivity relative to other forces with recommendations on how they could improve it.
Outcome
The tool is now being reviewed by the Home Office and policing leaders to determine whether it could be rolled out nationally. Ultimately, the goal is for this tool to act as the single source of truth for police performance and cost information to support Chief Constables in their decision-making around prioritisation of resources, officers / staff, and technology enablers as well as performance and spend.
Through the NEPRO3 Framework, we remain committed to providing the public sector with innovative procurement solutions that centre social value. We continue to champion SMEs, delivering both savings and value for money for the public sector.
To find out more, or to discuss your requirement in more detail, please contact us at nepro@nepo.org
